Julian T. Brolaski

Poetry | $15 $13

Gowanus atropolis is an ecopoetical exploration of the Gowanus canal in Brooklyn, a recently designated superfund site that was once a fertile fishing ground for the Canarsie Native American tribe. The poems grapple with reconciling the toxicity of the titular Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn and the east river in ‘Manahatta’ with the poet’s search for the pastoral in New York City. A queer elegy for when language might have been prior to thought, where the phrase becomes the thought, rather than the other way around—so that the dystopic might become, if not utopic, at least measurable / pleasurable, ‘melodious offal.’ Gowanus atropolis reinscribes, as always already present, both queer and Native spaces in and around the Gowanus through a radical reshaping of English.

Includes a letterpress broadside print featuring a previously unpublished poem by Julian; numbered and signed by the author, plus a signed and numbered copy of gowanus atropolis.

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Excerpt

Excerpt from gowanus atropolis:

the fish begin to speak queerlysomething that never will happen beforealexander the greatmy contemporarygirding the neckau quelque crossroadswot disgorgesthe libertine's lapn the ganymede's hole

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About the Author

Julian Talamantez Brolaski is the author of Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011) and co-editor of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press / Belladonna Books 2009). Julian lives in Brooklyn where xe is an editor at Litmus Press and plays country music with Juan & the Pines (www.reverbnation.com/juanandthepines). New work is on the blog hermofwarsaw.

Advance Praise

Aspirate all h's and brace to meet Sludgie, 'erstwhal' of the Gowanus, displaced echolocator through a lush verbal wildering of neologisms, hot archaisms, and barbed portmanteaus. Brolaski finds the 'herm' in 'hermunculae' and puts the 'gee' back in 'ambigenuity.' The tongue hasn't sounded this flexed and full since Chaucer lapped up Romance, but these damesirs sing instruction with their fishairs: one 'ynvents a grammatical order' so to 'speke englysshe/polymorphously.'—RODNEY KOENEKE

gowanus atropolis, it made me want to build a better blurb. A biggerish blur. Not an index, even if I could— “wots left of the ecosystem” sings. But—I don’t know what atropolis means—that’s ok, that’s what the poems said to me. It’s a place. gowanus atropolis: neighborhoods that came before, and inside, language, as it built itself, apart from itself, just as so many bodies, being neither one gender nor the opposite, give dictionaries the slip. Also places in New York, California, fleshy with fishes and asphalt, submerged yet audible histories. These poems don’t build a new dictionary so much as they create new forms of being intensely present to that which so often gets left out, which disappears as standard usage hardens us into place. The elisions. The middle. The sounds that move between persons and phones, in a cloud on the train, or the screen. Nonsense, too—that which confounds owners and upsets all contracts fills these lyrics with a mysterious energy. Everywhere I turn, “a buck in the corridor”, encounters I cannot reason or push or identify my way through. I stand still. A little giddy. Our eyes meet.—STEPHANIE YOUNG

Once in a while there are poems which create entire fresh terrain. And I'm saying too that it's hard to come home from it, locator dials set anew. I'm jangling from the return, like the world had descended upon me so quickly through the poems it was some time before I realized I was still in one piece, and minted with a beautiful little scar. Julian's deviance is a hazard of poems which bend the muscle of light. I can hardly wait to share our extra strength when we've all read them!—CACONRAD